What do you say when someone you love is struggling in a way that concerns you? I didn’t realize I’d been carrying that question until my colleagues shared their stories about mental health with me.
I work at EverDear, a California-based company that makes memorial diamonds and jewelry. Many of the families who come to us are grieving, some after losing someone to suicide. When we signed on to support the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Out of the Darkness Community Walk in Pasadena, I wanted to write about why it mattered to us. So I asked our customer service team: had any of them spoken with a family affected by suicide?
The replies that stayed with me came from mothers, and two of them were about their own families.
One colleague told me about her son. For several years, he went through a period so dark that she didn’t know whether he would come through it. She carried the questions that come with that kind of fear: Did I cause this? Is it my fault? Could I have stopped it?
What changed things for her was a decision about how to relate to his experience. She put it to me simply: love him, trust he’s doing his best, and be there if he needs you. Once she stopped letting fear lead, she could meet him where he was. She let go of second-guessing everything he did and accepted that some lessons he’d have to learn for himself. These days, when she’s worried, she asks how he’s doing and tries to listen instead of jumping in to fix things.
Her son did the hard work of finding his way through. In his teens, he went to therapy on and off with someone she’d found for him. As an adult, he found a therapist on his own. He’s in an amazing place now. When she asked him about his new job recently, he told her he was overwhelmed and stressed, and she was simply glad he’d opened up to her about it.
Whenever she talks about how they got to a place where he felt he could open up more readily, she comes back to her decision to trust him and simply be there.
Another colleague, also a mother, told me her own mother had died by suicide. When I asked how she’d carried it, she responded, “The legacy of suicide is always present.” It follows her into the decisions she makes as a parent. She has made mental health a priority in her home, looking after her own mental wellbeing and watching over her children’s with the same care.
As I heard what they had shared, something inside me was touched and wouldn’t settle. These two colleagues and I work in different offices, so we’d never before had the chance to get to know each other that well. But now, I felt close to them in a way I hadn’t expected. I’m a mother too, and like them, I want nothing more than to protect my child from pain. Yet when my own child has had hard days, I’ve felt stuck, caught between wanting to help and being afraid of saying the wrong thing. More than once, I said nothing and let myself believe it would pass.
My two colleagues had chosen differently. Faced with the hardest thing they knew, both of them looked straight at it and answered as mothers, by showing up for their children with love and attention. (I now know from my friends at AFSP that according to suicide prevention research, asking directly about suicidal thoughts is always the right thing to do, and will not put the idea in someone’s head or prompt them to act.)
I was still thinking about what they’d told me when another colleague reached out about a family she’d been supporting for months. These parents had lived through the loss my first colleague spent years being afraid of: they had lost their daughter. Something one of the parents said had worried my colleague about them, and she asked me what to say and how to be there for them without making things harder. It was the same question I had been stuck on as a mother.
I didn’t have an answer for her or for myself, so I went looking for one. AFSP gave me a place to start. Its Real Convo Guides offered words for moments that can feel impossible to begin, and its advice for when someone is at risk showed me what comes next. I turned what I learned into a few pages my colleagues can keep close, so the next time a grieving parent says something hard to hear, we’ll have somewhere to begin. Everything in those pages comes back to presence: staying close, listening, and taking someone’s words seriously. I also now know that support is available for survivors of suicide loss, such as AFSP’s Healing Conversations program, as well as virtual and in-person events across the country for International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day each November.
I’m trying to practice what I’ve learned. When my child is struggling, I try to stay in the moment and ask what’s wrong, even when I’m afraid of the answer. Some days I still freeze, but I’m learning not to let silence be my answer.
When our team walks on November 7, I’ll be thinking of these mothers, and of everyone who has had to love someone at risk, everyone who has made it through their own darkest days, and every family who has trusted us with their grief.
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If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available, including the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.